Who is needed?

This project can benefit from anyone with an interest in the following areas:

Java Programming

UI Design

Usability Guidelines

Application Documentation - too early to produce user docs right now

Anyone wishing to participate in the project must ensure that they can comply with the requirements outlined on the Requirements for Participation wiki.

Building the app

Note: I have had pretty limited success in getting the BlackBerry drivers to work under Linux, and to my knowledge, RIM does not offer their SDK for Mac - which means that this project is going to need a PC.

Getting set up with a build environment is pretty straightforward if you've ever used Eclipse, and/or Subversion. Just follow the steps below:

Once the project has been loaded into Eclipse, start debugging the app by right clicking on the project, and selecting: Debug As > BlackBerry Simulator. The simulator should start and you should see the application icon under the 'Applications' section... to debug on your actual device, install the latest compiled app to your device using Desktop Manager (alx file after you've done Generate alx file) or OTA with access to the .jad file, then Debug As -> Blackberry Device, enter your Blackberry password (if you use one - highly recommended!).

If you want to test the application and its connections to the internet, you will need to start the Mobile Data Services Simulator (MDS). This can be located beneath your eclipse directory at the following location:

<path-to-eclipse>\plugins\net.rim.eide.componentpack4.5.0_4.5.0.16\components\MDS\run.bat (NOTE: For Windows Vista and Windows 7, turn off UAC to make this work nicely) - you can also set this up in your Eclipse Debug Configuration (Run->Debug Configurations, Simulator tab, General tab under that, option is "Launch Mobile Data System Connection Service (MDS-CS) with simulator")

This will simulate the data connection and compression that handsets experience in the wild

If the simulator fails to start, check your JAVA_HOME environment variable to ensure that it is settup correctly.

Note: There was an issue on a newly set up development system where the project would not build. This is caused by the path to the Java JDK bin missing from the PATH system variable. To fix, add the following <path to java directory>\Java\jdk1.6.0_10\bin to the variable.